Neville’s AdvocAte
This month Nev Marten ponders a divisive topic, that prickly matter of ‘relicing’. We await the brickbats!
We have heard the ammunition by now.“Why pay an grand extra for someone to ruin a perfectly good guitar?”,“What’s wrong with letting it age naturally?”,“I want my guitars without a mark on them”,“It’s like buying pre-ripped jeans!”These are just some of the common complaints among those that just don’t get the relicing thing. And my guess – from looking at Guitarist’s Facebook page at least – is that the naysayers outnumber the pro lobby by some margin. Or perhaps they just shout louder. Well, as something of a relic myself I find this a fascinating topic.
Now, I’m not saying that what I’m about to tell you had anything to do with it (the apocryphal story is that Keith Richards ordered a load of ’52 Reissue Teles for a tour but sent them back because they looked and felt“too new”), but at a trade show in London the year before relics hit the streets I went up to someone at Fender and told them their rows of guitars, while fabulous, seemed somehow boring and lifeless.“I’d love to see them with a bit of honest-to-goodness road wear,”I think was my comment.
Whatever it was, the next year Fender displayed the first Relic Nocaster at the same show and I badgered them to let me buy it straight off the stand. I did a gig with it right out of the box that night, and felt amazing with it round my neck.The gasps of envy from every guitarist that saw it, still ring in my ears over 20 years on. Having owned original Fenders and Gibsons that had faced the genuine ravages of time, I loved how Relics looked, how they felt and how they sounded – that thinner skin of nitro finish and worn-off neck lacquer makes a real difference, to these hands and ears at least.
However, when we reviewed the first Custom Shop Relics as they arrived, the comments began to fly.There was no grey area, a Marmite issue if there ever was one; people simply loved or loathed the concept. It’s not for me or anyone here to tell people what’s right or wrong about it, but personally I still love them – I have a ’52 Relic boundbodied Custom Tele in Candy Apple Red, and the faded Fiesta Red ’60 Relic Strat that’s appeared in these pages and which I ordered to my spec. But I also have a shiny Les Paul CustomTrue Historic and aVOS Memphis ES-335 so I’m not totally one-sided on the issue, despite liking a played-in look.
Curiously though, there’s a parallel Custom Shop phenomenon that’s crept in over much the same time period and is the other side of the coin completely. It’s the conditio nobsessed, case-candy obsessed guitar buyer that seems to care more about these aspects than an instrument’s playability or sound. I get the impression that some of these guys don’t even play their guitars for fear of fingerboard wear or causing even the tiniest ding. I was thinking of trading in my ES-335 for a Tom Murphy aged ’59 Les Paul and was told by two stores that without all the certificates and other nonsense that I’d somehow mislaid, it would be worth hundreds less, if indeed I could sell it at all. Now that’s bonkers – a few bits of case tat more important and valuable than the gorgeous musical instrument inside?
Now, in my book people are at liberty to treat guitars as objets d’art, investments or whatever they want. It’s their money. For some, buying guitars is all about owning something fabulous, be it the aforementioned Fenders and Gibsons, a Private Stock PRS, Nik Huber, Eggle, Suhr or whatever. For others, like me, it’s a bit of that (there’s definitely an element of the chase about it), a bit of wanting what my heroes had, plus a bit about the simple pride of playing a great guitar.At the root of it though, it’s a tool that gets a specific job done, and if it gains the occasional battle scar so be it. I view it as the instrument’s right of passage to becoming a genuine relic in years to come.
The kick in the teeth for the likes of me, of course, is that those who care obsessively about their guitars’ condition will inevitably have the last laugh. I mean, look what happens when a museum grade Les Paul, Strat or D28 surfaces – its value is three, four or a dozen times that of a‘player’ equivalent.
Really, though, let’s not get hot under the collar about this. Enjoy your purchases whichever way you want.Just realise that if you ever buy a guitar from me it’s liable to have a few miles on the clock, real or otherwise, and in my book will be all the better for it.